After the game Murray wandered home with me for something more substantial than hot dogs. I scrounged around in my bare larder and came up with tuna, frozen fettucine, and olives. We drank a bottle of Barolo and put crime behind us for a few hours, while I found out how much exercise my dislocated shoulder was up to.

Murray and I have been competitors on the crime scene, friends, and occasional lovers for several years. Somehow, though, the relationship never seems to develop. Maybe our rivalry over crime investigation gets in the way.

Around midnight the Star signaled him on his beeper and he left to deal with a Mafia shooting in River Forest. Beepers are one of the twentieth century’s most useless inventions. What difference does it make if your office finds you now rather than an hour from now? Why not give yourself a break?

I asked Murray this as he pulled his T-shirt over the thick auburn curls on his chest.

“If they didn’t know where to find me, the Sun-Times or the Trib would beat me to the story,” he mumbled through the cloth.

“Yeah,” I grumbled, lying back in bed. “Americans are afraid that if they unplug themselves from their electronic toys for five minutes, they’ll miss out on—everything. Life. Imagine no TV, no telephones, no beepers, no computers for three minutes. You’d die. You’d be like a beached whale—”

I was working myself into a frenzy over our appalling dependency on gadgets when Murray dropped a pillow over my face. “You talk too much, Vic.”

“This is what happened to the girl in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” I padded naked after him down the hall to make sure all the locks got closed behind him. “She brings this guy home and he suffocates her with her own pillow … I hope you write a definitive exposé of the Chicago mob and get them run out of town.”

After Murray left I couldn’t get back to sleep. We’d gone to bed early, around seven-thirty, and slept for a couple of hours. Now I felt all the loose ends of the case whirling around in my head like trails of fettucine. I didn’t know where to find Bledsoe. It was too late to try the Phillipses again. Too late to call Grafalk, to find out if he had gone to that Christmas party alone. I’d already burgled the Eudora Grain offices. I’d even cleaned my apartment earlier in the day. Unless I wanted to wash dishes twice in twenty-four hours, there wasn’t anything for me to do except pace.